I would say I'm surprised, but really I'm just disappointed with the EF Protocol's continued presumption of decentralisation as a given. Let me be clear: FOCIL doesn't work if the attester set doesn't want it to. The protocol priorities post focuses on post-quantum as a goal, fine, and pays lip service to CROPS; "FOCIL is Hegotá's consensus-layer centerpiece. Our appetite beyond it is close to zero unless an addition directly supports post-quantum readiness." The elephant in the room the EF continues to ignore is that the chain is centralising at a rapid pace, and there is a lack of interest in either acknowledging the problems, or prioritising fixing any of them. For example, correlation penalties (7716) they describe as: "Adds slashing-logic surface for validator correlation with no CROPS or PQ contribution. Not a priority in a fork, we are trying to keep the CL scope light." This is inaccurate to start, 7716 has no slashing logic, and its misguided at best to assert that it doesn't contribute to CROPS. 7716 is the best EIP on the table to improve client diversity and penalise centralisation. It's not a panacea, but its what we have, it should not be DFI'd. Spending a year on H-star to ship FOCIL without addressing the validator set's underlying issues risks the big few centralised staking entities saying 'actually nah' and refusing to attest to slots with ILs they don't like. This costs them no rewards, thinking we'll socially slash them for it is wishful thinking, and now Ethereum is compromised and you need permission to use the chain. Preventing this outcome is not a matter of one EIP on the margin, it needs a cultural shift within the EF to realise they don't have a divine right from God to a decentralised chain, and that they can't just focus on academic challenges like PQ while ignoring real challenges like the ongoing acceleration in chain centralisation. We need quarterly reporting on the state of the chain, to make it harder for people to keep their head in the sand as to the severity of the situation. We need at least one EIP per fork focused on improving the nakamoto, staking gini, or other aspect of the validator set, and we need pragmatic, action-oriented leadership who care about Ethereum being CROPS beyond just a purity test. (I'm hoping that's @pcaversaccio). There are some people in the EF that care about the chain being CROPS for real, but unless we the community are outspoken and steadfast in our demands, they won't be listened to. Please show them why we're supporters of Ethereum and not any another centralised chain, please advocate for decentralisation and CROPS in H-star and beyond. Thank you.

Two production distributed validator clients will introduce a whole new level of resilience and security for Ethereum Staking setups. If you do a distributed key generation with half Charon clients and half Pluto clients; not only will no operator see the full private key, there's not even one software implementation helping you create them that interacts with all of the private key shares. This idea of not having one single piece of software (or hardware or human) that can cause the compromise of a validator's private keys is where the ecosystem is maturing towards. I call this a stage 1 validator setup. Stage 2 is when a single point of failure doesn't even take the validator offline. Tens of billions of dollars in companies and funds are staking their investors' ETH for them. One developer getting phished or one software supply chain being compromised is not an acceptable risk for what could be a double digit % loss from the slashing penalty or worse, and operator failure is not necessarily covered in all staking insurance fine print. This is why institutions will stake their ETH with professional operators running collectively as part of a Stage 1+ distributed validator rather than individually. Two clients brings us another step closer to achieving that vision.

There's a lot of bluster about sockpuppets and deleting comments in the issuance debate. Lets not lose sight of the actual outstanding questions about the proposal and ensure they get researched and addressed such that the community can have an informed debate about Ethereum's security. - None of the issuance analysis includes costs, when you do, this proposal is not good for solo stakers, it makes them worse off both nominally and relatively versus other types of stakers. - None of the issuance analysis accounts for the fact that ~97% of the network makes a real rate of return on the existing curve no matter the equilibrium because they are not staking only their own eth. This happens on both ends of the spectrum, the extremely large professionals, and the extremely small homestakers. Only the ~1% of solo stakers are focused on in the analysis so far (without their costs being accounted for which significantly alters the analysis). - No other large PoS chain has runaway staking. These chains all have far larger dilution, and far less penalties for PoS failures. It tracks that Ethereum's equilibrium on this curve is likely lower than them (so <60% imo). I am not aware of a reason why in Ethereum, delegators will take more risks, for less rewards, while there are also better alternative uses for their capital (including simply protecting it in a cold wallet for the lowest dilution in the ecosystem). - Ethereum does not have $100b in economic security, its likely under a million dollars per day. This proposal could drive it down 5-10x from there. There is no analysis as to whether this is likely enough of a security budget to protect Ethereum from a concerted attack. - We have no agreed upon tracking of the network's Nakamoto (nor gini), these are measures of how easy it is to take over the chain, or how disastrous a failure of a particular multi-sig, smart contract, or custody platform might be. We should first be tracking them, and secondly we should be consensus-seeking on what is a sufficient number for them. I believe a Nakamoto of 10 should be the minimum tolerable floor. (and that gini needs to go down not up as it has been) - Ethereum's security (Nakamoto) has been falling for ~2 years as the chain centralises. This isn't only due to the current curve, the delegation rate has been pushed far lower in this time, and the illiquidity penalty of native staking is forcing delegators to choose the most liquid staked eth offerings. We should be trying to improve the security posture of the chain rather than exacerbating the problems it faces by making the majority of delegation options non-viable. Correlated downtime penalties, a burn2exit feature, and boosted whistleblower rewards on key compromise, could all push the mean preference to solo stake or delegate stake to the long tail of operators, which would improve the chain's security (nakamoto) rather than hurting it. - Stake quality is more important for Ethereum's security than stake quantity. The amount of operators it takes to control the chain is what we should care about, not the viability of a finality reversion event. We should not be damaging the chain's security to push a ratio by likely less than 20%. - Without a cost model of stake, we haven't a good understanding of where equilibrium might be under the proposal (nor the existing curve). Backing into it from costs, I think 60m eth could be staked for as little as $5m per year by the biggest operators (0.002% issuance per year). If you account for MEV, non-ETH perks given to delegators to stake, and the value in controlling Ethereum, I think its very feasible for equilibrium under the new curve to be 45% or higher. An issuance that low would make all but the largest orgs non-viable. - Making Ethereum more centralised is more likely to re-value Ethereum in line with other centralised chains than it is to be rewarded with an increased valuation. Ethereum's value comes from its credible neutrality and its decentralisation. Changing issuance in the proposed manner hurts both. - We are a couple hard forks away from Real Time Proving, and a switch to Post Quantum Ethereum. The cost model for this chain is vastly different than the one we have today. Proposing blocks will take a server rack worth of expensive GPUs, and attesting with a Post Quantum signature scheme is also more costly than the existing scheme. We should be forward looking in this regard, and make sure we're making a change that allows block building to be at least modestly decentralised. Taking issuance to near zero and not making any allocation to the costs of proposing will lead to a world where as few as two entities can afford to eat the costs of producing blocks on Ethereum. We should not be re-doing the issuance model every couple years. Lets plan for the moment validation changes markedly, and lets build consensus for a change that best suits that future architecture. Forcing through a fast tracked change for a risk of dubious downside and dubious probability is not good for the network's reputation. - Cutting the security budget and losing a large amount of the operator set makes Ethereum less CROPS. Ethereum's scaling roadmap depends on having large amounts of independent operators on the network, to ensure its Data Layer remains available, and to ensure fork choice is not compromised. We have to decide should Ethereum's roadmap take decisions that favour its CROPS nature, or one that favours ETH's disinflation. I don't believe we should jeopardise the former for the latter. A maximum of 1.5% dilution is lower than almost every asset in the world, it is not so high as to cause CROPS issues imo, sub 0.3% is a bigger concern. These are not all of the concerns raised about this proposal, and some of these have been more addressed than others by proponents. The impact on DeFi and the Ethereum economy is also notable. I'm just flagging 10+ issues that are getting drowned out by infighting over the legitimacy of how we moderate this contentious debate. Lets focus on facts over feelings, and make a concerted effort to gather first-hand data and develop believable models, so that we can make informed decisions around what we think 'enough security' might look like for the chain on a multi-decade horizon. Thank you.

If you want to learn more about things i reference here, here are some of them: Costs to stake: validatorcosts.kyne.eu What is eth's real security budget: ethereum-magicians.org/t/eip… What types of data should we be collecting, and where is the tradeoff between validating on a smart watch versus pumping the gas?: nitter.net/OisinKyne/status/18687… How Ethereum will fail by attesters being selective about what they attest to, rather than a finality reversion event: web.archive.org/web/20220603… Ethereum's increasing gini: nitter.net/robplust/status/197587… Correlated downtime penalties (EIP-7716): ethresear.ch/t/supporting-de… Probably some more around too but that can be a start, reply if you've more questions.